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Freshwater fishing: what to learn, and in what order

Britain's default entry point and, because of the coarse/game split, the discipline whose vocabulary confuses beginners most.

18 steps, 74 pages, and no account to make. Every step below links to pages that already exist on FishingHQ — this is the ORDER to read them in, which is the thing nobody tells you when you start.

Nothing here records what you have read, and nothing asks you to sign in. Come back to this page and pick up wherever you like.

The steps

  1. Step 1 of 18

    Getting started

    • What you actually need to start fishing — start here

      A rod, a reel, line, hooks, weights, something to cut with and permission. Everything else is a preference, and most of what is sold to beginners is a preference.

    • Your first hour: what to do, and in what order

      Arrive, check you are allowed and safe, look at the water before you touch the tackle, set up once, fish close before you fish far.

    • Licences and permission

      In most places two separate things are needed: a state licence to fish at all, and permission from whoever controls the water — and having one is not having the other.

  2. Step 2 of 18

    Coarse, game and predator: what the words mean

    • Coarse, game and sea: the British three-way split — start here

      Britain divides angling into three worlds with separate tackle, literature, clubs, seasons and vocabularies — and the division is social history rather than biology, which is why it confuses everybody who arrives from outside it.

    • Coarse fish: a category that does not travel

      A British classification with no biological content, invented socially rather than scientifically, and meaningless in most of the world — including to readers who will nonetheless encounter it constantly in British writing.

    • Coarse fishing

      The British and Irish tradition of freshwater angling for species other than salmon and trout — and the most accessible way into fishing there is.

    • Predator fishing

      Freshwater angling for pike, perch, zander and other fish-eating species, using lures, deadbaits and livebaits rather than groundbait and small hooks.

  3. Step 3 of 18

    Float fishing

    • Float fishing — start here

      Suspending a bait at a controlled depth beneath a buoyant indicator — the most visual, most controllable and most widely applicable method in angling.

    • Float, bobber and quill

      One object, four vocabularies, and a genuine difference underneath the words — between something that only signals a bite and something that also controls where the bait sits.

    • Waggler float rig

      A float attached by its bottom end only, so the line between rod and float can be sunk beneath surface drift.

    • Pole fishing

      Fishing with a long jointed pole and a short fixed line, giving bait placement precision no rod and reel can match.

  4. Step 4 of 18

    Feeder and ledger

    • Ledgering, bottom fishing and legering: one idea, three words — start here

      Fishing a bait on or near the bottom with the weight resting rather than suspended — the most widely practised approach in the world, and the one with the least consistent name.

    • Ledgering

      Fishing a bait on the bottom held by a weight, with no float — the simplest way to fish at distance, in depth, or in wind.

    • Feeder fishing

      Legering with a weight that also carries bait, so that free offerings arrive in exactly the same place as the hookbait, cast after cast.

    • Running leger

      A bottom rig in which the line runs freely through the weight, so a taking fish feels almost nothing.

    • Method feeder rig

      A moulded feeder with bait pressed around it and a very short hooklength, so the hookbait sits in the middle of its own small pile of feed.

  5. Step 5 of 18

    Lure and spinning

    • Spinning, casting and retrieving — start here

      Three words that anglers use interchangeably and practitioners do not — and one of them names a reel, a technique and a lure category simultaneously, which is where most of the confusion starts.

    • The kinds of lure, and what each imitates

      Lure categories are defined by what they do in the water — action, depth and how they are worked — rather than by what they look like on a tackle wall, which is why the shelf is organised in a way that teaches nobody anything.

    • Spinning

      Casting an artificial lure and retrieving it so that it moves like something alive — the most direct form of lure fishing.

    • Crankbait or jerkbait: continuous action against imparted action

      One lure works when you wind it and the other works when you move the rod. That is the whole distinction, it is not obvious from looking at them, and it decides which conditions each suits.

    • Spinner or spoon: two different ways of making flash

      Both produce flash and vibration and they produce them by different mechanisms, with different depth behaviour and one of them putting a great deal more twist into your line.

  6. Step 6 of 18

    Fly fishing

    • Fly fishing — start here

      Casting a nearly weightless artificial using the weight of the line itself — a solution to a specific problem that became a tradition of its own.

    • How fly casting works

      The rod is a spring loaded by the line's mass; the loop is the evidence that the load was applied and released properly.

    • The four fly types, and what each imitates

      Dry, wet, nymph and streamer describe where in the water a fly works and what it pretends to be — and in salt water the same four categories imitate crustaceans and baitfish instead of insects.

    • Presentation and drag

      A drifting fly must travel at exactly the speed of the water carrying it. Everything a fly angler does on the water is in service of that.

  7. Step 7 of 18

    Carp fishing

    • Carp fishing — start here

      A specialist branch of coarse fishing that has driven more tackle and bait innovation than any other, built around a single learning species.

    • Common carp

      A large, long-lived, highly adaptable cyprinid whose capacity to learn has shaped more angling technique than any other freshwater fish.

    • Hair rig

      The bait mounted on a short link below the hook rather than on the hook — the single most consequential rig invention in modern coarse fishing.

    • Hair rigs, and presenting a bait off the hook

      One of the few genuine inventions in modern angling: separating the bait from the hook so the hook is free to turn and take hold as the fish ejects the bait it has decided against.

  8. Step 8 of 18

    Predator fishing

    • Predator fishing — start here

      Freshwater angling for pike, perch, zander and other fish-eating species, using lures, deadbaits and livebaits rather than groundbait and small hooks.

    • Northern pike

      The dominant freshwater ambush predator of the northern hemisphere: long, cryptic, and built for one violent acceleration rather than pursuit.

    • European perch

      A small, shoaling, spiny-finned predator that is both the most accessible predator to catch and the one most anglers first learn on.

    • Wire trace deadbait rig

      Two trebles on a wire trace, positioned in the outer flesh of a deadbait so the fish can be struck promptly and hooked in the jaw.

  9. Step 9 of 18

    Trout, salmon and sea trout

    • Trout, char and salmon: what the words actually mean — start here

      Three words covering one family and three genera, applied so inconsistently that two of the most familiar trout in the world are not trout at all.

    • Brown trout

      A single, extraordinarily plastic species that appears as a tiny hill-stream fish, a deep-bodied loch trout and a silver sea-run migrant — all the same animal.

    • Atlantic salmon

      An anadromous salmonid that migrates from its natal river to the North Atlantic and returns to spawn — and a species in serious, well-documented decline.

    • Grayling

      A salmonid with a sail for a dorsal fin that feeds hard through the winter — which makes it the game angler's season when the trout season has closed.

  10. Step 10 of 18

    Rivers and running water

    • Reading a river for fish — start here

      A river is a repeating sequence of the same few features, and each one holds fish for a different reason. Learning the sequence means arriving at an unfamiliar river already knowing where to look.

    • River levels, and what a flood changes

      A river coming up, at its peak, and falling are three different fisheries. Most of what is said about high water is true of exactly one of them, and knowing which is the whole skill.

    • Lowland rivers

      Slower, deeper, often coloured rain-fed rivers with mixed beds — the classic coarse fishing rivers, and the ones most shaped by what happens upstream.

    • Chalk streams

      Rivers fed by groundwater filtering through chalk — exceptionally clear, thermally stable, and globally rare.

  11. Step 11 of 18

    Canals and drains

    • Urban and canal fishing — start here

      The most accessible fishing in the country, on water most anglers drive past, with a structure-reading problem quite unlike anything on a river or a lake.

    • Canals

      Man-made, shallow, narrow and almost uniformly featureless — and the most accessible freshwater in Britain for anybody without a car.

    • Fenland drains and lowland waterways

      Straight, engineered, shallow waterways built to move water off farmland rather than to hold fish — which makes them a fishery with no natural features and a completely different reading problem.

  12. Step 12 of 18

    Lakes, reservoirs and lochs

    • Lowland stillwaters — start here

      Enclosed bodies of standing fresh water — lakes, ponds, reservoirs and worked-out gravel pits — where everything is decided by depth, weed and temperature.

    • Reservoir fishing and depth

      A deep engineered water hides its features under the surface and stratifies in summer, which turns 'where are the fish' into a vertical question before it is a horizontal one.

    • Commercial coarse fisheries

      Purpose-built, stocked, day-ticket water — the most-fished freshwater venue type in Britain by a very wide margin, and the place most people who fish have actually fished.

    • Reservoirs

      A drowned valley or a walled bowl built to hold drinking water — where most British stillwater trout fishing happens, and a body of water that behaves like no natural lake.

  13. Step 13 of 18

    Tackle for fresh water

    • How a fishing rod works — start here

      A rod is a spring that stores the energy you put into it and gives it back. Almost every casting problem a beginner has follows from not knowing that, and from trying to throw the weight instead of loading the rod.

    • How a fishing reel works

      A reel stores line, releases it under control when a fish pulls, and recovers it. The three common layouts solve those problems in mechanically different ways, and the difference decides what each can cast and how each fails.

    • What rod action and rod power actually mean

      Action is WHERE a rod bends. Power is HOW MUCH force it takes to bend it. They are independent properties, routinely used as if they were the same one, and the confusion costs people the rod they wanted.

    • Attaching line to a reel spool

      The knot nobody thinks about until a fish empties the spool, and the layer of tape or backing beneath it that stops slick line spinning on the arbor without ever taking up.

  14. Step 14 of 18

    Rigs

    • What a rig is — start here

      A rig is the arrangement of everything between the end of your main line and the hook. The word appears on almost every page of this platform, and this is where it is defined for somebody meeting it for the first time.

    • Rig components, and what each one is for

      Swivels, beads, clips, booms, crimps, links and sleeves. Each is answering a specific problem, and a rig carrying components whose purpose the builder cannot state is a rig with unnecessary failure points.

    • Waggler float rig

      A float attached by its bottom end only, so the line between rod and float can be sunk beneath surface drift.

    • Running leger

      A bottom rig in which the line runs freely through the weight, so a taking fish feels almost nothing.

    • Why rigs tangle, and the principles that stop it

      A rig tangles in flight, not in the water — and almost every fix is about making the hook end travel behind the lead rather than beside it.

  15. Step 15 of 18

    Knots

    • Choosing a knot for the line you are using — start here

      A knot is a material problem before it is a shape problem. A knot that holds beautifully in nylon can slip out of braid without deforming, and the property that decides it is friction rather than cleverness.

    • Wetting, seating and tag ends: the three things that decide whether a knot holds

      Three habits, none of which appear in a knot diagram, and which between them account for most knot failures. The diagram shows the shape; these decide whether the shape survives contact with a fish.

    • Palomar knot

      A doubled-line knot to a hook or lure that is simple, exceptionally strong, and one of the few that holds reliably in braid.

    • Double surgeon's knot

      The line-to-line join that does not care whether the two lines match. Four operations, tied in seconds with cold hands, and the standard answer where a blood knot's diameter limit bites.

  16. Step 16 of 18

    Bait

    • The kinds of bait, and what each is for — start here

      A map of the bait categories for somebody who does not yet know the categories exist: what each one is, what it is imitating or offering, and what each demands of you before it reaches the water.

    • How to hook a bait so it behaves naturally

      Hooking position decides three things at once: how the bait moves, how long it stays on, and whether the hook point is available when a fish takes. Those three pull against each other, and the bait type decides which wins.

    • Sweetcorn

      Tinned sweetcorn: cheap, bright, visible, and one of the most effective and most accessible coarse baits in existence.

    • Bread

      A single loaf provides four genuinely different baits, catches a very wide range of species, and costs almost nothing.

    • Particle baits

      Small seeds and pulses fished in quantity — hemp, maize, tares and tiger nuts — which hold fish in a swim by giving them a great deal to look for and very little to eat.

  17. Step 17 of 18

    Licences, access and permission

    • Licences and permission — start here

      In most places two separate things are needed: a state licence to fish at all, and permission from whoever controls the water — and having one is not having the other.

    • Who regulates fishing, and how to find your rules

      Fishing rules are made at several levels at once, by different bodies, and satisfying one of them is not satisfying all of them. This explains the structure so that a reader knows which questions to ask and of whom.

    • Close seasons

      Periods during which fishing for some or all species is not permitted — a protection concept whose dates, scope and existence all vary.

    • Habitat damage from bank and shore access

      Getting to the water and standing beside it does damage that accumulates invisibly: trampled margins, eroded banks, cleared vegetation and disturbed intertidal ground. It is the harm anglers do most often and discuss least.

  18. Step 18 of 18

    Fish care, unhooking and returning

    • Handling fish safely — start here

      Teeth, spines, gill covers and venom — knowing which local species have what, before you catch one rather than afterwards.

    • Landing net or hand landing: what each costs the fish

      A welfare decision most anglers make without noticing they made it, and the evidence points at the net material rather than at the choice between net and hand.

    • What actually happens to a released fish

      Releasing a fish is not the same as the fish surviving, and the difference is decided almost entirely by things the angler controls.

    • Reviving a fish before release

      A fish that will not swim away has not recovered, and letting go of it is not releasing it. Reviving means restoring water flow over the gills and waiting — and one widely repeated technique makes things worse.

The other paths

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